The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld Publications)

Anyone got an ARC?

Is it not out yet? Actually at time of longlisting it was also helpfully on GR under three separate listings but librarians have sorted.

According to the Kindle store, it should be out (digitally at least) on August 24th. From what I can see, it's the only book completely unavailable at the moment (unless ARCs are available).

I am looking forward to this one when it is released. I thought Grace was excellent if a bit torrid.

This is one dark book - but will definitely be on my shortlist.

I loved this

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer wrote: "I loved this

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..."

What a great review. I agree pretty much completely. Whilst this is very much a novel for the here and now it is also a novel of the past, sadly, a novel which will probably always find some resonance as long as humans are humans.
I thought the first half, with its slow trickle like effect of a build up of the forthcoming breakdown of society was the stronger of the two.
There is a real pace to this novel, a page turning almost thriller like drive to the storyline and yet, as you say in your review, the writing is of such quality that you find yourself going back to reread certain passages.
If there's one small criticism I have it is that there is perhaps too much packed into this. So much so that at times it felt maybe a tad rushed. Personally I didn't need all the bits about the father's dementia though I can see others would appreciate this aspect to the story.
Perhaps the most impressive thing is that despite all that happens, and there is a lot to take in, it always feels completely believable. It is hard when reading not to be drawn to thoughts of Darfur or of course Ukraine. And to show that the story bears witness to history as much as the present there is one scene especially where I was reminded of images from Sarajevo.

A remarkable book, well worth its place on this list and would make a deserved winner.

Thank you re your comment on the review and yes this would be a good winner.

I’ve pre-ordered this as well. Nice review, GY.

This is Lynch's interview :
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...

It is amazing to know how he started writing the novel and how it made itself. It took him 4 years to finish it so it is not an act against the war in Ukraine

Just finished, and I see this as a probable winner. Brilliant, moving and timely.

Yes to all four of your views Hugh.

I loved the interview where he says the book is an exercise in radical empathy.

Published today - interesting that while Waterstones and Daunt (and other book shops?) have had copies Amazon hasn’t, including no Kindle until today.

I rank this first of the nine I've read so far (the nine longest). Exquisitely written, I found myself rereading passages. And really, this is not a longlist of beautifully written novels. So I very much enjoyed that element of the book. BUT...I can not imagine recommending this book to anyone I know except one of my granddaughters who loves dark despotic books. It was as though any time there was a scene that could go in one of several directions, you knew it would go in the worst, most miserable one. Okay, maybe the end was a minor exception, but I had to (grimly) laugh in several places by how ludicrously black the whole thing was. I would go so far as to say I hated, intensely, this novel, yet am ranking it first so far because of the language, and the lousy competition.

That’s interesting - although dark the action here seemed to me very plausible /almost inevitable once you get over the initial concept of a police state in Ireland.

Whereas Old God’s Time seemed the one deliberately over the top

There were many decisions made, or not made, by Eilish that I found beyond improbable. And yes, Old God's Time was bleak pilled on bleak. But isn't that the almost unifying element of this longlist?

For some reason after reading thousands of depressing pages from eight novelists, this one was the step too far.

Thanks that make sense.

The first few negative reviews of Prophet Song are trickling in:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwf6w0DAz...

From its gerund-heavy, aimlessly sprawling sentences to its vaguely rendered dystopian setting, everything about #ProphetSong frustrated me. This is not my first encounter with punctuation-less dialogue or run-on grammar, but compounded with its disorienting sense of space and overly personified descriptions, I’m just exhausted. This book reads like how I image watching a film with every 5th frame removed would feel. Unwieldy.
. .
I am left wondering about the conceit of this novel. It is a book so caught up in the interiority of its protagonist, a scientist and mother of four named Eilish, that it loses grasp on its politically charged subject matter—deflating the genre-defining thrill of world building and offering a few made up acronyms and some recent real-world benchmarks. We’re privy to 300-some pages of one woman’s struggle to keep her family together, which, while emotionally expansive and generally thoughtful, could take place anywhere and at any time. Her tenacity is a saving grace of the text, offering at least some psychological commentary on why, in the face of danger, people cling to their homes. Larger gestures towards topics of fascism, trafficking, control of the media, trade unions, and refugees all fall short. Perhaps I would have been more generous to this book and more receptive to its call for empathy were I not so burnt out on its stylistic choices.

That’s the sort of negative review that makes me want to read the book all the more - makes the book sound great.

Which to be fair is a mark of a well written negative review Ie the reviewer explains why it doesn’t work for them, and by extension those with similar reading preferences.

Paul wrote: "That’s the sort of negative review that makes me want to read the book all the more - makes the book sound great."

It too makes me very curious to read and see where I stand! My copy is unfortunately only arriving mid September (nothing in stock locally).

Generally if Matthew Scirappa dislikes something then there’s a 99.9 % chance that it will be the best book you’ve ever read

I'm on team Scirappa for this one

A very valid review but which describes everything I loved about the book.

Deflating the genre-defining thrill of world building sounds like an important literary mission statement rather than a negative.

Robert wrote: "Generally if Matthew Scirappa dislikes something then there’s a 99.9 % chance that it will be the best book you’ve ever read"

Those sort of reviewers are quite useful. Jay Rayner the Guardian's restauramt reviewer serves a similar purpose for me is his sphere and the FT's film critic used to be a reliably bad guide as well.

I agree- it’s always good to get a different viewpoint.

There is a potential weakness of the book buried in this thought.

The author is aiming for “radical empathy” by taking a Syrian/Libyan etc societal breakdown and transferring to his home country. With a novel with limited world building and a very high dose of interiority he risks losing exactly the emotional connection/reaction he is aiming for. This is not a Levy /Bernstein type novel where the book is deliberately enigmatic.

For me he pulls it off but it’s a risky strategy - another reviewer on Instagram who really liked the book said she found Black Butterflies more impactful even though a Dublin based mother.

That's a good observation, and something I'd like to build on. From an Irish perspective, I found this book incredibly compelling but some of the depictions of what the totalitarian state consisted of rubbed me the wrong way. Throughout the pandemic, a lot of conspiracy groups in this country made constant comparisons to fascism through the disruption to daily life (e.g. schools closing) and gardaí being implemented at checkpoints to ask why you're traveling.

It did come as a relief to find out that Lynch started working on the novel in 2019 and thus isn't trying to make the same tasteless comparisons that those particular groups did, but unfortunately there were a few instances in this novel where I was put off due to the similarities.

I am about a third of the way in, and have just got to the bit where the schools close, people are told to work from home and the supermarket shelves are bare - so I see what you mean.

It seems a valid comparison though - as with free speech, there is always a trade-off in civil liberties between the rights of the individual and their impact on others. As discussed on the Istros thread they ended up driven down the route of mad conspiracy theories by what started as concerns about how Covid restrictions reminded them of Communist-era Eastern Europe. And NB I say that as someone who would have preferred more stringent lockdowns.

Indeed from the third I've read, one criticism would be that - a few lines from the Garda officer's wife aside - there isn't much justification given of why the authorities are acting this way.

It does feel also so far more a book about interiority than about any wider significance - i.e. the empathy is more 'this is what it feels like' rather than 'this could happen here'.

His interview on the book is well worth reading - partly as it shows how the book is neither one thing nor the other but doing multiple things (see the epigraph that he wants to use) and partly as it shows how he answers the questions in a way similar to how he writes: Lonely is the writer’s room and long is the time it takes to write a novel.

For me, if every aspect of the crisis had been fully explained, the book would have had to be twice as long and far less interesting to read.

Yes agreed as Paul said he went for the interior approach instead

And so I sought to deepen the dystopian by bringing to it a high degree of realism. I wanted to deepen the reader’s immersion to such a degree that by the end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for themselves.

But the question for some readers is whether the required suspension of curiosity into what is happening undermines the immersion.

Paul wrote: "Deflating the genre-defining thrill of world building sounds like an important literary mission statement rather than a negative."

I put this to Matthew Scirappa and this was his gracious response.

I feel like I would have enjoyed this more if it had leaned into the genre elements, or more deliberately broke the rules of them. To me, that would be the more impressive achievement-to pair the use of genre with the intellectual rigor/prose of good lit fic. Instead, this sort of vague middle ground (especially as someone who loves to revel in some genre fic) just distracts.
Regardless, it seems you jive with this overall more than I did, which is good!
I wish I had enjoyed it more!

Yes I don't think this does have the M John Harrison approach of deliberately breaking the rules.

But agree with Hugh less world building and less pages is a good thing.

It almost feels Kafkesque in that one doesn't really know what exactly the threat is that the authorities are reacting to, although again it doesn't go that far.

So his middle ground point is well made - except not sure what I'd change (other than, so far, a bit more exposure to those supporting the regime - it comes across so far as assuming the regime is just bad).

I think the book though is much more about living under the regime - not the regime.

The book had to be centred around Eilish, paying attention to the hidden life of unrecorded acts, constantly asking the question, how much agency does an individual have when caught within such an enormity of forces? In that regard, I consider the book metaphysical rather than political. We are desensitised daily by seeing events like this on our media and so I wanted to make a claim for fiction, to show the reader what fiction can uniquely do.

Dreams are used a lot in the book, which isn’t something I normally like in a novel as it seems a lazy tool. What did people think of their use here?

It was something I was going to ponder on a second read - but on a first read it struck me that given what the protagonist is living through she would absolutely have vivid dreams/nightmares as her brain tries to process the new and rapidly evolving situation and wake frequently so remember them.

Agreed although it does do the corny thing of setting up scenes and then revealing it’s a dream.

While I agree it's a bit cliched by now, the utilisation of dreams feels fairly justified in a novel that deals with trauma on this level. I thought the scenes particularly involving characters who were missing by that point in the narrative (trying not to give too much away here...) worked particularly well as a way of the mind attempting to provide clarity and resolution when the present is filled with turmoil and confusion.

I was trying to say that - you were just a lot more articulate.

Just read this again (number 8 on my re-reads) and it will be top of my final rankings.

I have to agree with Sciarappa on this one.

I find this novel very frustrating and patronizing. The story and characters feel one-dimensional. There is no nuance. Everything is so very black and white.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CxXSaDQLQ...

I just finished this book, my 12th to finish on this longlist. This is the first one on this list that feels (to me) like it could be the winner. I’d be happy with this as the winner. Yes, it’s unrelentingly bleak, but it’s very immersive and powerful. I think it’s realistic, which is scary. The sentence-level writing is unique and beautiful, definitely worthy of a Booker winner. This one goes at the top of my list.

Off to read the final book, The Bee Sting.

I was so sure when I read the opening pages of this one that it was going to be my #1 but the more I read, the less I liked it. I hate disagreeing with GY, but this one falls into the category of admired and respected rather than liked. It did feel too one-dimensional to me, and while I understood the reader to be experiencing the unfolding situation from Eilish's perspective, for me it made the experience of reading it feel flatter than I wanted. And then of course the bleakness and the continued horrible unraveling of Eilish's life did not help, although the same could be said for so many of the books on this year's longlist.

I just finished, and I think it would be a worthy winner, since it is one that I can see becoming a future classic.

I think I appreciated it more after just reading The Orphanage, which is about the horrible situation in Ukraine and has many parallels to Prophet Song.

I find it relevant to today's world, as well as a reflection of what has happened many times in the past.

Yes I also thought of The Orphanage while reading this one. A lot of similarities except that one shows how real this is.

It took me awhile but I finally got around to this one. I'm surprised by all the negative reactions. Aside from the idiosyncratic prose (which may not be to everyone's taste, but happened to work for me), the primary critique seems to be that it's improper/patronizing/condescending to set a dystopian novel chronicling government overreach in Ireland when worse things are already occurring in the world.

The assumption seems to be that the purpose of the novel is to open the eyes of Western European readers to what can happen under an overreaching government. I'm not sure I read it that way. It's hard to imagine someone reading this whose eyes are suddenly opened to the evils of government surveillance.

Instead, I think the book is more naturally read as a critique of people like Eilish, whose doltishness and procrastination facilitate the unobstructed rise of a muscular police state. Her failure to act until it's too late is the point. Instead of a reader surrogate, she had my ire from the get go.

When I read negative reactions to this, I feel like I'm missing something fundamental, perhaps a subtext to the critique that I'm not privy to.